Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sus]

Say, has anybody experienced the following effect on an otherwise somewhat stable fort:
My fort was trundling along just fine, until sometime at the 3rd year I started noticing sporadic "Urist McLaborer cancels Work: Hunting vermin for food." reports.
As time moved on, they got more and more numerous. Despite there being 1) plenty of free food industry labor, 2) all the necesary workshops and 3) plenty of animals designated as "butcherable",  nobody actually seemed to perform the actual work of butchering, although it's most definitely set "on" in my food worker template in Dwarf TheRapist. Does not seem to be a burrows issue either, since plenty of food workers were running to and to and fro through the food workshop area which is the same burrow as pasture. The only thing I could think of was they're all priorizing some other job (e.g. animal training) so aggressively that there's no labor left for butchery or plant collection.

I'm at a loss here, people. What am I doing wrong?

Also, the farmers seem to run out of seeds. Is the cooking of seeds allowed by default again?

[Garath]

upload a save, maybe someone will take a look. There used to be a disappearing seed bug, but I havn't heard of it in ages. Were you cooking the plants themself? you might have cooked untill no seeds were left. Double check burrows, are the workshops maybe forbidden ((t) to check)? Have you accidentally destroyed access between levels? even if you're convinced, check it anyway, especially when using ramps.

[caddybear]

Did you do a mass forbid of your workshops? Or dumped the seeds along? Something similar happened to me when I was cleaning my food area from goblin bodyparts after a particularly messy siege, I happened to dump ( and forbid as they go hand in hand ) quite a lot of my foodstuffs.

So yeah, try and check for that.

[dexxy]

Try turning off all the other jobs on your butcher. Also, did you forbid the type of stone the workshops are made of?

[oldark]

And along the lines of pathing checks, keep an eye out for rogue trees growing in non-stone hallways.

[Mushroo]

A couple of useful screens you might not know about:

o, W, b (toggle auto-butcher on/off)
z, animals, b (this is how you designate animals to be butchered)
z, Kitchen (this is where you turn ingredients on/off to be cooked/brewed; make sure you are not cooking your seeds or plants)
z, Stocks (if you have a Bookkeeper then you can use this screen to inspect your stores)

What I would do immediately in a situation where dwarfs are starving and hunting vermin is:
1. Check the z, stocks screen. Do I have food available? If "no" skip to step 3.
2. Check that the starving dwarfs are uninjured, have a physical path to the food, and are not restrained by burrows. Hopefully this solves the problem!
3. If you need quick emergency food then one method is to go z, Kitchen and temporarily enable surplus foodstuffs (prickle berry seeds, wolverine tallow, etc.) for making "emergency biscuits" for Cooking at your Kitchen. Or butcher something big, that will create a big pile of meat and organs that dwarfs enjoy eating raw straight from the butcher shop.

[greycat]

Make sure you didn't accidentally toggle one of the new stockpile options, like "only take from links" instead of "take from anywhere".  And remember that if a stockpile "gives" to a workshop, then that workshop will only accept materials from the stockpiles that "give" to it.

[guitarxe]

When you say that

3) plenty of animals designated as "butcherable", 

did you actually go into the animals screen and press 'b' on the animals that you want to be butchered? Make sure you do, because just because an animal CAN be butchered doesn't mean it's designated to be butchered. You have to do that part manually.

[Tibbz2]

This happened to me a few weeks ago... I never fixed it though.

[vertinox]

Cooking destroys seeds. Brewer creates them. Basically turn off cooking for plump helmets for a while to you have enough seeds and then go back to cooking if you'd like. Personally I brew only plump helmets and use eggs for the source of food.

[Mushroo]

Here's a tip:

If you have a) a planter dwarf, b) a farm plot set to plump helmets year-round, c) plump helmets disabled cook and brew, d) a dining hall (optional but recommended)

Now your dwarfs will not starve to death if you make a mistake micro-managing your prepared food industry. Hungry dwarfs will eat plump helmets raw, which creates a seed. The planter will plant the seed. A few months later 1 or more new plump helmets will be ready for harvest. The cycle repeats.

[dexxy]

Personally I brew only plump helmets and use eggs for the source of food.

You only let them eat eggs? The smell must be awful!

[Garath]

we're talking about dwarfs here, who think bathing when you have blood on them even if that is once every 3 years is the way to hygiene


I'm hoping OP will give us an update soon

[Sus]

I think it was the cooking issue again. Apparently, cooking of plump helmets is not turned off by default.

Still no idea why my "feeder" dorfs seem to prefer to spend all their time "storing item in stockpile" (i.e. "derpin' around like a bloody moron") to "butcher animal"... They aren't even supposed to haul anything besides food. 

I would post the save on DFFD except I only thought about that after abandoning and reclaiming. If the problem persists, I'll post the savefile.

[magicwalker]

People have already given some pretty good suggestions on how to combat this, but I'm going to offer another because I think what happened is you left your brewing industry running on repeat.

Check your stocks often, just to get a feel for how much Food and Drink you have.
Then look at the plants that you have available for turning into Food or Drink.
Don't use all your plants for one and neglect the other if you need both; i.e. if you leave your brewing industry on repeat, it'll consume all the edible underground crops, except quarry bushes and dwarves will eat those seeds raw (rock nuts) which often makes the process not sustainable. And if you leave your kitchen making 30 Lavish meals, you can quickly end up with no plants for brewing.